What's in a name?
You want to know what I hate about the process of writing novels?
Coming up with names.
Judging by the number of “Help me name my character!” threads on the NaNoWriMo forums, I’m not the only one.
Seriously. What a chore. That is hands-down my least favorite part. On the one hand names are irrelevant to the story, so inventing them feels like make-work. But while a rose by any other name might smell as sweet, your characters’ names must sound right or you’ll lose the reader.
Well, most of the time they’re irrelevant to the plot. One book I read recently jumps to mind as a great counter-example where the author built a significant reversal about the character into the revelation of what the character’s name means. It’s is enough of a spoiler that I’d ruin the book for you simply by telling you its name, so I won’t.
Setting the occasional counter example aside, usually names are nothing more than labels to hang on the characters so we can keep the players straight. For example, there’s no reason why J.K. Rowling had to give Harry Potter that particular name. She could have called him “Alan Smithson” and made it work just fine, too.
Names do have to sound right, though. That is, they must fit with readers’ preconceived notions about names for people with similar backstories. At the very least they must not clash with the backstory too severely, unless you explain why. For example, absent a good reason for doing so, you wouldn’t give your lovable Irish priest character a name like Boris Solyarin, because that doesn’t sound at all Irish. It sounds Slavic. Or, you wouldn’t give your Femme Fatale a cartoon character name like Jessica Rabbit unless, well, unless she actually is a cartoon character.
I didn’t grow up in Dublin or Belfast, and I didn’t grow up in Toon Town, so for me it’s difficult to think of names that match the backstories of characters who did. Or, frankly, characters with any backstory different from my own broad socio-economic background. Thus, names become tedious research which doesn’t help me advance the story. Goodness knows any book involves enough research just to satisfy the plot; I don’t need name research dumped on me as well!
I end up wanting to name all my characters “Bob” and just be done with it. Of course, I don’t. Here’s what I do:
Don’t sweat it too much
Honestly, if you have as much trouble with character names as I do, the best single piece of advice I can probably give you is just to relax. Once you start stressing over the perfect name for your sexy Brazilian Women’s Volleyball team captain, you’re going to find that everything you think of doesn’t match up to what you want. Everything ends up sounding stupid. But that’s just to you, because you’re the one stressed out about it. Readers are much less likely to think the name sounds stupid so long as the name is plausibly Brazilian, and plausibly female.
Just google for “Brazilian Girls Names” and pick the first thing you find that you don’t absolutely hate. Odds are it will be just fine.
Have fun with it
One thing you can do is pick a name that bears some relationship to the traits of the character in question. This can be fun, because it turns the name into a private joke between you and anyone else who is word-wise enough to get it. For instance, in the novel I’m writing this month, I have a minor character who’s a Russian woman. Her backstory involves having done some very difficult things in her past, things that were necessary. While googling “Russian girls names” I happened upon “Darya,” which at least according to that one website, comes from the Russian word for “strong.” To me, that fits. So that’s what I picked.
Take care, though. It’s easy to go overboard with this. For example, (paging Dan Brown, paging Dan Brown...) naming your red-herring character “Arringarosa,” which literally means “red herring,” is taking things just a bit far. On the other hand, Neal Stephenson made that trick work just fine in Snow Crash with the sublimely named “Hiro Protagonist,” so as always, there’s proof that you can violate any rule of writing so long as it works.
Have faith
If it helps, pick a name as above but make yourself a deal: if you really and truly believe that the perfect name is out there somewhere, just waiting to be found, then give yourself permission to change the character’s name later. Pick something so you can get going, but let it be nothing more than a placeholder until the One True Name comes along. If there is some perfect right name for the character, then you have to have faith that it’ll come to you eventually. When it does, great! Search-and-replace is your friend. But if it doesn’t, then there probably wasn’t, and again your placeholder name is just fine.
Still, a rose is a rose is a rose
The name may be invested with all manner of emotional weight for you, the writer, because you are in the intense emotional throes of writing the book. But for the reader, the name just has to satisfy two simple criteria: it has to readily identify the character, and it has to sound right enough that it doesn’t blow the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief in your story.
Compared to writing a whole novel, that’s not a tall order. So pick a name and move on. You’ve got a story to write!
November 05, 2009 00:20 UTC
7 Comments:
Posted by Iapetus999 on November 06, 2009 02:08 UTC
My novel is set in Connecticut, so I’m using local geographic names for my characters: Stratton, Putnam, Killingworth, Harwinton, Mansfield, Covington, and for my mythical village, Podunk, from the Indian tribe of the same name. So they all come from some Podunk town :)
Posted by dirtywhitecandy on July 13, 2010 15:09 UTC
Love your point about the name having to fit the reader’s conceptions. I firmly believe in changing names as the novel develops. This goes for characters and towns - even the novel’s title. But I don’t let it hold me up. I start with placeholder names, then let the real name evolve, or come upon me by surprise.
Posted by Greenbandit2010 on July 13, 2010 17:00 UTC
I have, on one occasion, named a character just so that I could use a specific punchline at the end of the book. I’m considering writing the joke out, but the name ended up fitting, anyway.
On another occasion (same book) a minor character with an Eastern-European accent who couldn’t stop looking through her neighbor’s blinds got a last name that translates to “Busy Body” in Polish.
Posted by Jason Black on July 13, 2010 19:25 UTC
@Greenbandit2010 — Oh, yes. I too have been guilty of sneaking in-jokes and homages into the names of minor characters. I love finding ways to add a little something fun for readers who happen to get the joke or the reference, as long as they don’t distract from the story or cause confusion for readers who don’t happen to get it.
Posted by Marc Vun Kannon on July 14, 2010 11:11 UTC
Character names have never been a problem for me. I write fantasy, so a lot of the time it’s just strings of characters anyway, but I want strings that sound nice, and that fit into my loosely defined naming conventions for a particular society. Tarkas, the hero of my series, got his name from the gods themselves. The first sentence just appeared in my head, and his name was the first word in it. Or Hara-Khan the Redeemer, whose name was in a dream I had. Some names I borrow from people I know. Place names give me much more trouble. In ST. Martin’s Moon, I had no problem naming Marquand and Candace, but Marquand came from Greater Not Relevant for the longest time!
Posted by Jason Black on July 15, 2010 02:41 UTC
@Marc Vun Kannon says:
but I want strings that sound nice, and that fit into my loosely defined naming conventions for a particular society.
So they’re not actually “just strings of characters” after all. They have structure and meaning behind them, and that’s what makes the difference. The worst fantasy manuscripts I’ve read really did have names that, it seemed to me, the author chose simply on the basis of being exotic and alien-looking. And yes, it’s a conceit to human readers who grew up with our earth cultures as a background, but it really does help the reader get into the book if the names are at least pronounceable.
I agree with you on placenames, though. Place names are a bugger. My philosophy is that to get convincing place names in fantasy settings, there’s a lot more that you as an author have to work through in terms of the world’s backstory. With personal names, those can be cultural and tied to the language spoken by the people in question. That’s basically two major pieces of backstory—culture and language—you have to invent before you can derive a really solid system for creating names.
But with place names, there’s a two more elements in the mix: geography and history. The actual names of places, if you look at place names in countries with much longer histories than the United States, are usually a combination of geographic and linguistic factors (e.g. “Oxfordshire” in England more or less translates as “village where the oxen can cross the river"). The geography is something you have to invent, but chances are you’ve already done that.
But unless a place has been occupied by the same cultural/linguistic regime for a very long time, the place names are going to reflect the history as well: as different cultural/linguistic groups move around through migration or conquest, different naming schemes will come into play. New places get named by their creators according to the creators’ traditions, while old places often keep their original names, but usually butchered into the linguistic conventions of the whoever the most recent conquerors were.
For example, when the British took over India some centuries ago, they had some trouble with the native pronunciation of one of the major cities, which under English rule then became “Bombay.” Recently, with the resurgence of India as a world power in its own right, the Indians have un-renamed it back to the original “Mumbai.” Or, where I live in the Pacific Northwest, we see place names that are a mixture of anglo-saxon naming (cities like “Kirkland,” “Bellevue,” “Redmond") and names that persist from the indigenous tribes (cities like “Puyallup,” “Sequim,” “Issaquah,” and of course “Seattle").
So pity the fantasy author who cares enough to be diligent about place names: he or she must invent all that cultural, linguistic, geographic, and historical detail before the true texture of the place names in his or her fantasy world becomes clear.
Posted by Wayzgoose on November 05, 2009 15:17 UTC
I couldn’t agree more. Seems that I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to name characters. What is an Arabic name that has a normal English sounding equivalent nickname? I also fight a tendency to have all male names start with “J” and often go overboar. The name, though, might just come clear as the story progresses, even if it wasn’t right when it started. After all, the character is in the driver’s seat!